Interesting things have happened in this church. Once the minister was ordered not to lay the text on the cushion (as was then the custom) of the Princess Anne, who used to attend here when she was living at Berkeley House, nor “to take any more notice of her than other people,” as old Sarah of Marlborough indignantly records; but the rector refused to do this without an order in writing, which the Crown did not think it expedient to give; Defoe was scandalised at the charges made here for a seat, “where it costs one almost as dear as to see a play”; and in the churchyard Gibbon once stumbled and sprained his foot, but he is careful to particularise the time of the mishap, “between the hours of one and two in the afternoon,” so that there need be no shaking of heads. Gibbon, who was nothing if not “genteel,” selected his church well, for Vanbrugh, in his “Relapse,” makes Lord Foppington say that he always attended St. James’s for “there’s much the best company!” [Illustration: “THE BULL AND MOUTH,” PICCADILLY.] The church and the churchyard in which Gibbon slipped, are so full of illustrious dead, that it would seem, indeed, a difficult matter to pass through them without stumbling against some “pointed clay.” Here lies Cotton, who shares the fame of the “Compleat Angler” with his friend Walton; Tom D’Urfey, who made up those “pills to purge melancholy” which so many have found a pleasant enough prescription; the artist Van der Velde, the royal marine painter, who knew the trick of marine painting if anyone did; Dahl and Haysman, the portraitists, and Harlowe, who reproduced the trial scene of Queen Katherine. Mrs. Delany was laid to rest here, so was Mark Akenside, who died in Old Burlington Street; Dodsley, the great Pall Mall bookseller; Gillray, who caricatured a whole generation, and “Old Q,” who scandalised another, and so on; while the great Chatham, and Chesterfield--that “glass of fashion”--were both held at the font which Grinling Gibbons had adorned. [Sidenote: PICCADILLY CIRCUS.] If we continue westward along Jermyn Street we shall come to St. James’s Street, which we have already traversed, and if eastward, to the Haymarket, which we have but recently left; let us therefore go up the little passage by the side of the church, and find ourselves in the full bustle of that part of Piccadilly which we have till now neglected. Piccadilly Circus is one of the sights of London. It is the starting-point of at least four great thoroughfares. To the west lies Piccadilly; to the east, Coventry Street, leading to Leicester Square; to the north-west runs Regent Street; to the north-east, Shaftesbury Avenue; while (lower) Regent Street, leading to Waterloo Place, lies south. “_That gentle hill which goeth Down from the ‘County’ to the Palace gate_,”